Computer Repair 101

This is a follow-up to my post the other day where I mentioned that I was going to order some new hard drives to replace the one that was generating errors in my mirror. What I didn't show in that picture was that my boot drive was running at at about 95% capacity, and had been for the past couple of years. I would clean it up and get it down under 90%, but it would invariably start collecting clutter again.

On Saturday I put in a curb-side order for a new SSD boot drive, and two new data drives. I decided to replace the 256GB boot drive with a 1TB one, and the pair of 2TB data drives with a pair of 4TB drives because they were on sale to the point where they were practically giving them away.

Since I know that someone might ask, the SSD is a Samsung 860 EVO, and the mechanical drives are WD Blue.

My plan was to ... somehow clone the smaller boot drive over to the bigger one and then copy the data across from the failing RAID to one of the new drives, which I would let Windows mirror overnight.

Almost a full day later, I now know how to do it the next time, and can shave off oodles of time. I spent much of the day going through tutorials and installing various free tools before I finally found the combination that did what I needed.

The data drive should have been easy, but it ended taking almost as long to deal with as the boot drive. I mirrored over the data readily enough, but I couldn't get Windows to extend its partition to use the rest of the unallocated space on the disk. A couple of help sites recommended a free piece of partitioning software, but when I tried to get it to extend the partition, it got to the stage of expanding it and then did the equivalent of a shrug, and suggested that I should buck up for the pro version.

Frustrated, I bounced from help forum to help site before I finally found something useful on a Microsoft forum. The poster had the same problem as me, and the person responded asking them to confirm that it was set up as GPT and not MBR, since MBR would not let Windows 10 extend past 2GB. Sure enough, my drive was set up as MBR.

Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows.
Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows without losing data
Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows without losing any data

After much digging, I discovered that one of the earlier tools I'd tested for cloning would also let me do that with a couple of mouse clicks. Sure enough, ten seconds later I had a GPT disk, and less than a minute later I had my data partition expanded to give me access to the full storage capacity.

I ended up having to clone my boot drive three times before I finally got it right. The first time I cloned it, the main partition and unallocated pace were not adjacent, so Windows would not let me extend the partition without converting the disk to a dynamic disk that would not boot.

After much research...

I cloned it again, but I told it to arrange the partitions in a different order so that the main partition and unused space were next to each other. I extended the partition and ... the computer refused to see it as a bootable drive.

After much more research...

I finally found a good article on pcmag.com that gave detailed instructions on how to clone your boot disk to a larger disk, and which two pieces of free software would do it for you.

Their process worked flawlessly on the first try, and when I swapped out the new SSD for the old one, my computer recognized it and booted into Windows. Not only do I have 77% free space on my boot drive now (versus 5%), but this new SSD is noticeably faster.

I just need to let my mirror rebuild overnight and I'm good to go for a few more years (until something else breaks).